Memory Techniques For Acquiring Spanish Vocabulary

There are two main parts of learning a foreign language.

1. Structure

2. Vocabulary

We try on as a general rule to avoid grammatical terminology as our experience shows this to be largely counterproductive in many students who are trying to learn Spanish. Many language teachers who have never really learned to teach and communicate with students effectively will often use the strict grammatical structure of a language as a tool to teach it.

We believe that real teaching should go far beyond that.

Structure Of A Language

Students are encouraged to start forming and thinking out their own sentences in Spanish from the very outset. When we talk about structure we refer to the framework of Spanish, the correct order of verbs and pronouns for example.

The most important thing in understanding structure are verbs. This is because once you understand how Spanish verbs work you essentially understand how the language works. Verbs are the backbone of most languages.

Learning New Words And Building Up Your Spanish Vocabulary

We encourage the practice of concentrating upon learning only 'active language' meaning basic Spanish words that are in frequent and everyday use. A broad base of between 2000 and 3000 words should be established as quickly as possible in order to be able to survive in everyday conversational situations.

Start by learning all the words most closely related between English and Spanish, these groups are decided by the endings of words such as "ible" or "ent" and so forth. It's the fastest way for any beginner to build Spanish vocabulary when starting with no prior knowledge of the language at all.

Generic vocabulary such as colors, dates, numbers and so on are necessary but should be left until much later as they are not considered core vocabulary.

Verbs however are and we can provide you with a list of the 100 most common verbs in Spanish which will suffice for most kinds of normal communication. We stress however that learning every conjugation is not advised. Just as vocabulary has a core set of words so to do verbs have a core set of tenses which should be learned and mastered first before moving any further.